Stefan's Confirmation and how many Americans does it take to bake cookies in Denmark?

This weekend was fun at the højskole. We had a mock confirmation party for Stefan, one of the Danish students here. Everyone was assigned a role. I was a friend of the family's and a semi-famous actress who had appeared on "Days of Our Lives." One of the teachers even played the drunk grandmother. We sang some Danish songs and although we didn't quite understand everything, there was enough that we either could figure out or was explained to us that made it a really fun evening.

It was weird because the parties here are normally on Saturday nights. This Saturday, they announced at dinner that the højskole had four new board games. Instead of the normal dancing and drinking, everyone was playing board games in one of the various groups spread out in the main room. It was quite a different sight. But it was definitely good to just have the opportunity to relax.

I was supposed to go to Christiania on Saturday, but I got really sick, so I didn't leave the højskole. Today I went into København to meet my friend Jackie who was going to meet up with us yesterday, but ended up being busy. My friend Carrie came along because she also wanted to leave the højskole, but didn't know where she was going to go.

We decided to bake cookies, so Jackie, Carrie and I went to the Quick Fakta, which luckily was open, even though it was a Sunday and a lot of places aren't. I tried to find the vanilla extract in the store. Eventually, I had to ask someone. I picked up a bottle and asked someone, who told me that I was holding mix for brown sauce. Apparently, they use vanilla in a powder form, not a liquid one as we do in the US. We also had to convert all of the measurements and try to figure out what oven setting to use. Luckily, Jackie lives in a kollegium with mostly Danish students who helped us out. Kollegiums are just like dorms in the US - lots of students live there in single or double rooms and there are communal kitchens and common rooms. The students living there are from several different schools, not just one like in the US where dorms are on one college's campus. Lots of students from our program live in kollegiums, but Jackie is the only DIS student in hers.

Tonight, I practiced my Danish with Siri and Lotte. Yesterday, Lotte and Peter were helping me. After I got through my homework, Peter rewarded me by playing Monty Python's "The Lumberjack Song" in Danish. Forget learning how to invite people to Tivoli, my goal is to learn how to sing it by the end of the semester. But hopefully, learning how to tell time and ask people if they have plans for the weekend will help me learn the pronunciation well enough to give me a fighting chance with the song.